‘Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood’ Scripter on How to Write For Videogames

Jeffrey Yohalem owes his career to the video game “The Prince of Persia.” Growing up in Santa Fe, he loved the game so much he would write additional scripts and stories for the historical adventure just for fun, and as an undergraduate at Yale University, he sought out Jordan Mechner, the game’s creator, for advice about what courses he should take to pursue a career in video game script writing. (The answer? Screenwriting and architecture classes, to better understand the level designs of video games.)

Yohalem, 26, is now the lead writer of the newly released video game “Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood.” ‘Brotherhood’ is the latest installment of French video game publisher Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed” franchise, which has sold over 19 million units worldwide. The title continues the adventures of modern-day bartender Desmond Miles and Renaissance-era assassin Ezio Auditore da Firenze, whose memories Desmond is able to access through a machine called the Animus. As Ezio, single players must recruit and lead a ‘brotherhood’ of men to fight against the powerful Templar Order and take back the crumbling city of Rome.

As lead writer, Yohalem is responsible for crafting the dialogue for both Ezio and the other characters he meets, such as the corrupt Cesare Borgia, “The Prince” author Niccolo Machiavelli and the noblewoman Caterina Sforza, the Contessa of Forli. Yohalem says his favorite scene from the game is an exchange between Ezio and Caterina, a former lover, after he frees her from a prison. After Caterina tells her savior that she was only in a relationship with him “to ensure [his family’s] allegiance to protect Forli,” he responds, “È la politica. (Politics.)”

“That was my George Clooney ‘Up In the Air’ moment,” says Yohalem. “It was my modernization of the game ‘Super Mario Bros,’ with the princess saying ‘no’ to the hero who rescues her.”

When writing dialogue, Yohalem tries to put himself in the historical mindset of his characters, to preserve accuracy, but simultaneously address issues he considers important to modern-day audiences. With “Brotherhood,” Yohalem specifically wanted to create a story about how hard it is to be a good leader. “Kids today are often taught that if they’re charismatic or give a great speech, people will follow them,” he says. “When that doesn’t turn out to be the case, they become very discouraged.”

In total, Yohalem wrote over 350 pages of dialogue (and later on, an additional 1,400 pages of game menus, databases, and puzzles) for the “Brotherhood” script, cranking out a stream of missions (“Destroy one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s war machines”) and romantic interludes (“I love you so, I want to sing it to the heavens”) over the course of three weeks, in marathon 10-12 hour writing sessions, this past winter.

Based out of Montreal, where he lives in a “cozy brick, stone and wood” loft, Yohalem prefers writing at home, ideally at 2 or 3 a.m., to better “get in touch with strong authentic emotions outside of work.” Ubisoft, however, encourages him to do most of his writing at their open-space Montreal offices, where he’ll block out the noise of colleagues with earplugs. “I don’t like listening to anything, including music, when I’m writing,” he says. “I find it distracting.”

In the office, Yohalem, a compulsive note-taker, sits at a desk that is covered in piles of paper, with recent documents sitting atop memos from two years ago, and old collections of cocktail napkins, post-its and cardboard fragments with scribbled thoughts at hand’s reach — though now that he has an iPhone, he’s been relying more his smartphone’s Notepad app than physical pen and paper. A single Ezio figurine also rests at his desk, as does his work-issued “clunky, old-school” HP Tower computer — whose screen is usually filled with online chat boxes, his preferred method of communication. Most of his IMs are with other Ubisoft employees in the company’s Quebec City, Annecy, and Singapore studios, with whom he’ll walk through a level to ensure the correct placement of his dialogue or to guarantee his stories “will flow through all the pieces of the game as a complete entity and not feel fractured.”

Within the actual structure of a video game, Yohalem works within a set of technical constraints of what his characters can and cannot do — a process that fuels his creativity. As an example, he explains that intricate hand movements, such as picking up a rock or a goblet of wine, are difficult to animate, so there’s a lot of back and forth with the technical team about what they want to spend their budget on. The tech team also encourages him to employ weapons and effects already in the AC universe in order to conserve limited memory space on the game’s disc. “Explosions, as you can imagine, are easy to include,” he said. In one storyline for “Assassin’s Creed 2,” the writers wanted the player to rescue Caterina Sforza from drowning. However, because the tech team deemed falling into the water and swimming too difficult to animate in their allotted time, they were forced to have Caterina stand in the boat helplessly, rather than falling into the water.

Given his relative youth in comparison to other video game writers, Yohalem says that he won’t hesitate to ask colleagues for advice. In one particularly helpful conversation at an E3 conference, Yohalem discussed emotions in games, and whether players could feel sadness or guilt in a game, with David Jaffe, the director of “God of War.”

“You can call anybody; there’s not a cult of celebrity,” he said. “You can email basically anyone and they’ll talk to you, no matter what company you work for. It’s an industry that’s still relatively open, and that’s what I love about it.”